Best Sex Writing 2006 by Felice Newman

Author:Felice Newman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cleis Press
Published: 2012-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

The Pole Test

Natalie Y. Moore &

Natalie Hopkinson

I look into my daughter’s eyes

And realize that I’ma learn through her.

—Common, “Be”

Comedian Chris Rock prowls the stage, bright lights blazing around him, his mouth running at a clip. He cuts an impressive figure in his black-and-wine-colored striped suit as he surveys the audience at historic Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. He’s taping an HBO stand-up special called Never Scared, but as soon as the talk turns to fatherhood, it’s clear that the man is shook. Black male comedians have given us a variety of takes on black fatherhood. There are the late Robin Harris, Bernie Mac, D. L. Hughley, who describe the anguish of fathering bad-ass kids, also known as “Bebe.” Others, like Cosby and Murphy, play the role of sober moralists.

Chris Rock takes the high road when the talk turns to his beloved baby girl. Worry lines crease his face, his visage full of angst. His eyes, always wild, appear to flash with genuine fear. He worries aloud how what he does now will shape his daughter’s future relationships. He does not want to send yet another woman out into the dating world with “daddy issues.” After much thought and consideration, Rock says he’s figured out his responsibility as a father to a little girl.

“My only job in life is to keep her off the pole,” Rock says soberly. “They don’t grade fathers, but if your daughter’s a stripper, you fucked up!”

The idiom of fathers, daughters, and the stripper’s pole has pierced black lexicon like memorable lines from Def Comedy Jam or In Living Color. By Rock’s estimation, a whole lot of men are fucking up in America. Somebody produced the sperm that spawned all those booties grinding on BET’s soft-porn video show Uncut. Someone helped populate the cult-hit documentaries Pimps Up Ho’s Down and American Pimp. Someone sired the stripper-turned-emcee-turned-fashion-star Eve. What rapper hasn’t included rhymes about strippers, from Ludacris to the Ying Yang Twins to the Notorious B.I.G.? A crop of books dubbed “hip-hop literature” is following the tradition of 1970s paperback blaxploitation writers Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, whose books are filled with hustlers and strippers.

And someone birthed hip-hop, whose entire aesthetic—at least as promulgated on cable and radio—seems to be based on the world’s oldest profession; all men are P—I—M—P—S and all the women are hos. As a whole, the hip-hop generation has found prostitution to be an apt metaphor for American capitalism, which under our generation’s watch has taken the literal and figurative pimping of black culture to new depths.

But Rock isn’t just speaking in metaphors before the sold-out Constitution Hall audience. The grip that strippers hold over men is as real as it gets. It can be a force as strong as heroin, as the married Chris Rock personally attests. “Someone has got to entertain the married men of America,” he says. This is not to disparage the strippers, Rock says. He means them no offense, he says over and over again. “Somebody’s got to do it,” he says, shrugging.

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